


The Bellowing Dark

by wanttobeatree



Category: Hannibal (TV)
Genre: Dark, Gore, Horror, M/M, Post Season 1, Zombie Apocalypse
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2013-09-08
Updated: 2015-05-17
Packaged: 2017-12-25 22:55:58
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 3
Words: 20,344
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/958584
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/wanttobeatree/pseuds/wanttobeatree
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“<i>You</i> called me, Will. And so I came. Undoubtedly I was a last resort – you were desperate, frightened and alone, perhaps still believed you were dreaming. Now you are awake. Would you say your situation has become less desperate?”</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Title and the seed of the idea from The Silence of the Lambs. ("And she wondered how it felt to wait for the jump light at the aircraft door, _how it felt to plunge into the bellowing dark_.") 
> 
> Bonus fanmix [here](http://frightfullytreeish.tumblr.com/post/60591655452/the-bellowing-dark-fic-download-01-a). As ever, a million thanks to everyone on tumblr who answers my stupid questions about guns and racoons.

Slowly, Hannibal rolls up his sleeves.

 

*

 

The tension on the bus is so palpable, so physically present, it is as if a wolf were pacing up and down the aisle alongside them. Will imagines even the most out-of-it inmates can feel its breath on the back of their necks. In front of him, Sharpe has been rocking back and forth since the drive began, his handcuffs rattling against the edge of his seat. 

They haven’t been fed in two days. Until this morning, they hadn’t seen any staff since then, no matter how loud some of them had shouted, how hard some had rattled their bars. 

“This is bullshit,” the orderly across the aisle from Will keeps whispering. “Oh Christ, oh God.”

There is a soldier driving the bus, others stationed at the doors. All of the orderlies – what there is of them, their numbers way below the regulations for a transportation of this size – are carrying guns. Will can feel how hard every heart is thumping. He stares out the window and watches another abandoned car come into view, this one charred inside and still smoking.

“When are we gonna get fed,” Harris snarls from somewhere behind Will. His chains rattle and his voice lifts to a roar: “When – are we gonna – get _fed_.”

“Sit down,” a soldier shouts. “Sit the hell down!” and then the orderly across the aisle lifts his gun and shoots Harris in the head. Sharpe starts screaming. There is shouting, there is gunfire, there is the thud of another body dropping to the floor. With his eyes closed, Will lowers his head to his knees.

He can picture the wolf, swallowing them whole.

The brakes scream.

 

*

 

Will opens his eyes.

He is lying on his side, his face pressed against cracked glass. He stares at the back of the seat in front of his face until he can piece together a handful of memories: the bus, the tension, the outbreak of the fight, and then the bus had swerved too suddenly off the road and for a moment all bodies had been caught in flight. He doesn’t remember the crash-landing, but somewhere between the lift off and this moment of waking the bus has rolled onto its side.

He runs his tongue along his teeth and finds that he has bitten cleanly through his lip, blood dripping out of the corner of his mouth and pooling in the cracks in the window. A tooth is loose. Everything is silent around him.

“Hello?” Will croaks, then coughs. It’s been days since he last spoke. His head throbs. He presses his cheek against the cool glass, ignoring the blood that smears further across his face, and breathes in slowly.

“Hello?” he calls again.

Crawling into the space between the top of the seats and the roof of the bus, he can see the bodies; easily half of the passengers, injured in the fight, or fall, or crash. The back doors of the bus are wide open. He edges to the nearest body – a guy he barely knew, Jacobson or something like it, who had screamed the place down with his night terrors every night. Will, clumsy in his cuffs, fumbles for a pulse, finds nothing. He searches Jacobson’s face for some sign that peace has come to him at last in death, and finds nothing.

“Shit,” Will breathes.

He wipes Jacobson’s blood from his hands. He presses his hands over his mouth. 

There are footprints in the blood, the trail trodden over and over by many different pairs of feet. He can imagine the surviving soldiers ordering everyone to leave the dead and the injured behind, to leave anyone who wasn’t already up and walking behind. No time to linger for the dead.

Will listens for the sound of approaching sirens and hears nothing.

 

*

 

Back up on the road, Will stares down at the corpse before him. It was shot in the head and it’s clearly been lying there for some time: advanced decomposition, partially consumed by wildlife, marked with tyre tracks. Their own bus drove right over its legs, judging by the fresh skid marks on the road. He closes his eyes and tries to imagine how someone could dump a body in the middle of the road and nobody do a thing about it for this long.

Gang warfare, maybe. Martial law. Civil war. It’s been months since he got to read a newspaper. It’s been weeks since he saw Chilton. The doctor left them. Whatever is going on, Will knows now, bitter and certain, the doctor left them all to rot.

Opening his eyes, he finds he’s moved several feet away from the body and now that distance is between them he can’t stand to get any closer again. The hair on the back of his neck is standing on end. Tearing his eyes away, Will looks to the horizon. The road wends through dense foliage and over the treetops he can see a plume of distant smoke, darker than any bonfire. The sight of it makes his skin crawl.

He considers climbing back down into the ditch with the bus to wait. A vehicle loaded with the criminally insane goes missing, sooner or later the authorities will have to come looking for it. He walks to the edge of the embankment and stares down at the bus, emerging from the trees like a wild animal, its doors a wide open mouth. It’s full of bodies, but it still looks hungry.

Will counts to ten.

“I am sane,” he recites, “and this is real.”

It has never been a particularly comforting thought.

He turns away from the bus. He puts his back to the smoke and the body and, facing out into the road, makes the decision to walk. He’s still in cuffs, his ankles still shackled together; if a patrol car passes by, they’d be bound to pick him up. Maybe even, if he’s lucky, take him to a hospital and treat the probable concussion that is pounding in his head and down his jaw.

Following the white line down the centre of the road, Will begins to walk. He can only hope it’s in the right direction, his ears straining for anything, for any human sound.

 

*

 

Two bodies in the backseat. A week old, perhaps. The driver’s side window has been smashed in and the smell coming out of the car is thick and cloying. Will circles the car, taking note of the grimy handprints smeared all over the windows and the luggage piled up in the trunk. Not a robbery, then. A teddy bear on the backseat between the two bodies.

He’s been walking for an hour or so uninterrupted, but it’s slow-going in his chains. The sun is beginning to sink low. The shadows of the trees stretch out into the road as if they’re clawing for the other side.

He forces the driver’s door open, gags at the stench and turns away. A cloud of disturbed flies rise up past his face. He retches bile onto the side of the road. Spits. Prays for a sip of water. At least now, he figures, pulling the collar of his t-shirt up over his nose, he’s not so hungry. He ducks his head into the car.

The two bodies, aged about seven and four, dressed in yellow and white pyjamas, shot in the head at close range. Judging by the blood splatter on the ceiling, the driver then turned the gun on themselves, barrel to mouth. With almost a full tank of gas. Crouching down, Will digs in the foot space, reaches under the seat. He finds a handgun with an empty magazine, a well-worn copy of The Phantom Tollbooth with a bookmark halfway through, a box of Milk Duds, and a single woman’s shoe. Flat, sensible, the kind of shoe she could run in.

He backs out of the car and takes a deep, thirsty breath. He spreads the evidence out on the roof of the car.

“You left in the night,” he says. “Suddenly, but not... unexpected. You’d packed, you were prepared. You drove until you...” Bending down, he checks the wheels, spots what he’s looking for. “Until a tyre blew out hard. Only a few bullets left. You couldn’t take your girls on foot out here, so you read to them until they went to sleep. And then you... finished the story.”

He flicks through the paperback. The bookmark is halfway through a chapter. 

“Sudden,” he says, “but not - _unexpected_.”

When his grip loosens, the book flips shut. He lets it drop out of his hands, back onto the roof of the car. Running his fingers through his hair, he paces around the car again. He rubs his hands over his face.

“What’s going on?” he whispers into his palms. He curls his fingers around the words, imagines he is holding onto the wolf’s tail; at the other end of his question there can only be the teeth, the snapping jaws.

He drops his hands. He stares down at the car window. Slowly, he presses his palm over one of the handprints on the window, and then another and another. It seems no two are the same. Many hands, dragging and smearing across the glass. He follows the trail back to the open driver’s door, nudges it shut, crouches down to stare at the blood on the edge of the broken glass.

“They surrounded the car. They... broke the window and pulled your body through.”

A dark patch on the tarmac. Dark patches on the grass. Will follows the blood down the low, grassy slope to the edge of the forest. The world around him is unnaturally quiet; no birdsong, or distant cars, or signs of life. There, nestled in the grass in the shadow of the trees, lies half a human hand, the palm chewed almost beyond recognition. The remaining fingers, with chipped blue polish on the nails, are curled as if they’re beckoning to him. 

Shuddering, Will covers his face with his hands. He is sane and this is real. When he lowers his hands and lifts his head up again, there is someone moving in the distance through the trees. They’re going very slowly, not looking Will’s way, not heading in Will’s direction. Lurching, jerky movements. Injured, maybe, or on drugs.

He tastes metal on the back of his tongue.

As quietly as he can, holding his breath with every rattle of the chain on his ankles, he shifts to the side until the trees have hidden him from view. He walks backwards slowly up the slope and to the car, then crouches down by the wheel and retches again, his empty stomach turning over and over. He is shaking, violent spasms that set his aching head on fire. He spits. He presses his back against the hubcap and breathes in and out into his cupped hands.

When he can stand again, the sun is just barely scraping the treetops. The shadow of the forest has consumed the car completely. Soon it will be dark on an empty, dangerous road. 

Gathering up the items on the roof, Will climbs back inside the car. He pushes the passenger seat as far back as it will go and crawls into the alcove, folding his legs into the foot-space and resting his head against the edge of the seat. His heart is thumping painfully in his throat. He puts the book and the candy on the seat and, with shaky hands, props the gun against his knees, the barrel pointed towards the broken window. The last few shards of glass hang like teeth, like fangs, a wide open mouth with a throat full of shadows and trees. He’s trembling. He has no ammo. He sits and listens to himself breathe.

After a few silent minutes waiting for – something, he pulls open the glove compartment. It’s awkward with his hands cuffed, crouching in this confined space and freezing at every imaginary sound, but he manages to sweep the contents out into his lap. A few roadmaps, a tube of lipstick, a box of ammo that he stashes between his knees with relief so strong it makes him dizzy, a cell phone that makes him even dizzier. It’s cheap and ugly, clearly for emergencies. It’s turned off. Holding his breath, Will turns it on. 

He sags back against the door when the little screen lights up and, allowing himself a grin, he dials 911 and jams the phone against his ear with both hands. He listens to the dialling tone, the click, the sound of a human voice on the other end of the line.

“Police,” he whispers, closing his eyes in relief. “I need police, I’m – there was a crash, you might have heard from the hospital already, I got left... behind...”

“-do not leave the house,” says the automated message in his ear, “do not open any windows or doors, boil all drinking water before-”

Will lowers the phone.

He presses his hands between his knees until his hands stop shaking, the message on the phone coming through just loud enough that he can hear it come to an end, roll over, begin again. He breathes in and out slowly. Once his hands are steady, he grits his teeth and dials Jack Crawford’s number, then Alana Bloom, then Beverley Katz. He tries the FBI Academy and gets the same pre-recorded message as before. He tries his local veterinary, punching the numbers in too hard. 

He drops his head back against the door.

There is only one number left that he knows.

Will turns the cell off to save the battery. He rotates his wrists in their cuffs and then, at last, with a pained grunt, he dislocates his thumb and slips his left hand free. If he is caught – if this was all some fever dream or concussed hallucination and in the morning he is just a madman hiding in a stranger’s car, he will be in trouble. He will be too relieved to care. He re-sets the joint, biting down on his lip hard enough to break the scab and send a fresh rivulet of blood dripping down his chin. Outside, the sky is greying, the light fading. He hears an owl hoot. He wishes so suddenly and fervently for his nice, warm cell - criminal insanity and all - he has to bite down on his hand to muffle the choking burst of laughter.

Something rustles in the trees and he stops laughing just as suddenly. Small sounds; probably just a rat, or the wind. Will silently slips a fresh magazine into the gun, waiting and listening until he’s sure the sound has passed. 

He turns the cell back on and dials the final number.

When he reaches voicemail, he lowers his forehead to his knees. He listens to Lecter’s voice through the ringing in his ears, with the tang of metal flooding his mouth. The recording tone reaches his ears from across a great distance and Will stares numbly down into his lap before he remembers to speak.

“I don’t know what’s happening,” he whispers. “The bus crashed. Probably concussed. I’m... west of Baltimore, somewhere in a twenty mile radius of the hospital, I think. Hiding in a car with two dead kids in the backseat. Nobody’s picking up the phone. I’m...”

He hangs up. He watches the cell for a few minutes, heart hammering in his chest while he waits to see if Lecter will call him back, and then he turns it off again. 

It seems like every time he blinks the sky grows darker.

Will rests his head back against the door, rests the gun on his knees, and stares up at the gaping window. The gaping maw. His eyes are growing heavy. He is drifting in the belly of a ravenous beast. Silent for now, at least.

 

*

 

Suddenly it is dark and not so silent. Will’s eyes snap open. He can hear slow, dragging footsteps, perhaps a few feet away from the car. He lowers the gun out of a faint beam of moonlight, until it’s completely hidden in shadow. He keeps breathing as slowly, evenly, softly as he is able. He doesn’t move.

Someone bumps into the side of the car. They exhale in a long, low, slow groan. A death rattle. It makes Will shiver. It makes the hairs on his arms stand on end. He stares straight ahead and concentrates on breathing. He can feel the person drag themselves along the side of the car and they groan again, right over Will’s head. 

Will presses a hand over his mouth and waits, and waits, until the person pulls away from the car and begins to shuffle away again, in dragging, lurching steps. Slowly, slowly receding.

He sits and listens, his heart hammering, until the footsteps have almost faded away. Keeping a tight hold on the gun, he kneels up to peer over the top of the dashboard. The person is about thirty feet away now, lurching on a leg that is clearly broken, a leg that is dragging along the road behind him. He doesn’t seem to be in any pain. As Will watches, he groans again and staggers and the damaged leg bends under his weight, thrusting the bone a little further through the skin. There is no blood. There is no pain. He keeps walking.

Will slowly lowers himself back down. He’s shaking. It’s cold. He wedges himself more tightly into his alcove and grits his teeth. Somehow, despite it all, with his eyes wide open and his gaze fixed on that gaping window, he floats away. He dreams.

A hand with chipped blue nail polish beckons to him from the backseat. Will climbs into the back and smiles at her. It’s Abigail, in yellow and white pyjamas. Her ear is still missing, blood dripping down the side of her face.

She smiles back at him, beckoning him closer still, but when Will moves towards her she starts to retch and cough. She opens her mouth impossibly wide. There are shards of glass where her teeth should be. There is something moving deep down in the darkness in her throat, between the trees. Will leans in for a closer look. Her breath touches his face.

He blinks. 

It’s dawn. He’s kneeling on the passenger seat, gun already up and in his hands and pointing at the window. A hand is reaching through, clad in blood-stained Baltimore hospital blue. It takes Will a disoriented second to recognise the face beneath all the blood.

“Sharpe,” he shouts, lowering the gun. “Sharpe, it’s Graham. It’s Will Graham.”

Sharpe groans. His eyes are cloudy and pale and he’s bleeding heavily from the side of the head. He snaps his teeth at Will and reaches further through the window, clawing with both hands. There is blood in his mouth and Will cannot read his face; Will cannot read anything that Sharpe is feeling other than the mindless desire to climb through the window and get to Will.

“Are you alone? Do you know what happened to the others?”

There is no light behind Sharpe’s eyes. He opens and closes his hands like a child reaching for a toy. In growing desperation, Will reaches out to him. His fingers brush Sharpe’s fingers and Sharpe thrusts his head fully through the window in an explosion of frenzied moaning at that brief touch, his fingers catching in the sleeve of Will’s jumpsuit and clawing and twisting. He yanks Will forwards with surprising strength. He opens his mouth wide.

Cursing, Will throws himself backwards with enough force that it pulls Sharpe forwards even further through the window, his teeth snapping at Will’s outstretched hand. Sharpe’s grip around his wrist is slick enough with blood that Will manages to brace his feet against the seat and yank his arm away. 

He slumps backwards, but before he can pause to breathe, to think, Sharpe starts grabbing at his feet instead. He gets hold of Will’s ankle and drags his legs upwards, Will bracing himself against the passenger door, wrapping his arm in the seatbelt and heaving backwards. He kicks out at Sharpe’s chin and jams the heel of his shoe into Sharpe’s face hard enough that it pushes Sharpe a little further back out the window, Sharpe in turn dragging Will a little further towards it. Will twists his arm in the seatbelt even tighter and fumbles with his other hand for the gun. 

“Sharpe, stop!” he shouts. “Please don’t make me do this!”

He kicks Sharpe’s head out of the window frame and Sharpe drags his head back in, his head wound catching on the edge – broken glass catching on his broken skin. The wound tears open wide, a flap of scalp and skin flopping down over Sharpe’s face. Raw muscle and flesh and bone exposed. Will gapes, sagging in shock, and Sharpe takes the opportunity to yank him hard. His fingers touch Will’s skin; his hand is clammy and sickeningly cold.

Will shakes his head. His ears are ringing, everything muffled as though it’s coming from across a great distance. Only the ghost of Sharpe’s rattling groan, only the ghost of Sharpe’s cold blood on his ankle. The sound of Will’s own hammering heart seems to be fading away. He kicks out blindly with both feet and feels them connect hard enough that the grip on his ankle slackens and Will lets go of the seatbelt and lunges for the gun, scrapes it with his fingertips, misses, grabs again. His feet are out the window now, the gearstick pressing into his spine, and Sharpe is grabbing hold again. Will’s fingers close around the gun and he swings it up to point at Sharpe’s face.

“Sharpe,” he whispers. “Sharpe, please - please don’t make me-”

Sharpe jerks. He staggers and shakes and slumps forwards against the car door, his head lolling forwards onto the window frame. His fingers clench spasmodically around Will’s ankle before they drop away entirely. His mouth falls open, dark, thick blood oozing down his chin. There is a meat cleaver embedded deeply in his skull. Will stares at it numbly. Some integral string that kept him fighting has been cut and left him slumped on his back in the driver’s seat, his feet out the window, his hands lowering the gun dreamily into his lap. He watches Sharpe twitch until a hand grabs the handle of the cleaver and heaves it free with a wet noise.

Will knows that hand.

He lifts the gun back up again.

“Hello, Will,” says Lecter a shade reproachfully, with his cleaver held high. There’s a crossbow in his other hand and a hunting rifle slung over his shoulder. He leans down to peer in the window at him, taking in the gun barrel pointed at his face, Will’s shaky grip, the two dead girls in the backseat. His face is impassive. 

Straightening up again, he wipes his meat cleaver clean on Sharpe’s shoulder and adds, mildly, “I apologise for the delay.”

“Stay back,” Will spits. 

He draws his feet back into the car, scoots backwards and sits up and braces his arms on his legs to hold the gun steadier. He stares down the barrel at Lecter. Lecter does not stare back. He barely glances at Will; instead he carefully pushes Sharpe’s shoulder with the side of his cleaver until Sharpe slides down the car door. Will hears the body hit the floor.

Lecter stows the cleaver away somewhere unseen and straightens his cuffs with equal care.

“I had some difficulty locating the site of your crash,” he says. “But once it was found, your compatriot led me to you. You fought admirably.”

“You were watching.”

Lecter inclines his head. “I was curious how you would handle the situation.”

Will begins to laugh. He has difficulty stopping, until Lecter reaches through the window and touches Will’s ankle. Will’s breath freezes in his throat.

“Let go,” he says, correcting his aim.

Lecter curls his fingers around Will’s calf, just above the ankle restraint, and for a second his grip tightens. Then with exaggerated care he steps back and lifts his hand away, lifts his palm up as though he is soothing a wild animal. Will almost chuckles, still tracking Lecter’s movements with the gun.

“Worried I might bite?”

“Among other things,” Lecter says.

He frowns down at his fingers and reaches into his pocket – Will tensing as he watches – to pull out a handkerchief. He wipes blood from his knuckles, lets the dirtied handkerchief flutter to the ground.

He says, “We should leave. More will be coming.”

“I’m not going anywhere with you.”

Lecter blinks at him slowly, like a snake. Despite himself, Will’s lips curl in sneering amusement at the absurdity of the situation. To find himself face to face with Lecter again like this. He feels dizzy and distant, as though he is floating. He knows that his body – no longer quite his body – is shaking, but he holds the gun steady.

“More will be coming,” Lecter says again. “ _You_ called me, Will. And so I came. Undoubtedly I was a last resort – you were desperate, frightened and alone, perhaps still believed you were dreaming. Now you are awake. Would you say your situation has become less desperate?” 

Will hesitates. He looks around himself, avoiding Lecter’s placid gaze. The slow slide of morning sunlight across the car has picked out in dusty gold the dozens of handprints on the windows. There is a new one on the driver’s side, Will notices, streaking down the glass from top to bottom. A hand that had pawed lazily at the glass over his head.

“Tell me what’s going on,” he says.

“Not here.”

Will glares at him. Crawling out of the car, keeping his gun trained on Lecter, he follows him a short distance down the otherwise deserted road to Lecter’s vehicle. Instead of the Bentley, he has a large and dirty jeep, grill dented, blood on the headlights. 

“The previous owner no longer required it.”

“Killed him, did you?”

Lecter purses his lips, inhaling deeply. “In a manner of speaking. Please excuse me.”

He opens the passenger door for Will, but when Will makes no move to get in Lecter shrugs. He leaves the door hanging open, leaves Will to stand and watch while he strolls further up the road. He stops on the edge of the verge twenty feet away and he waits.

Will hears her before he sees her: her dragging, rattling breath. The underbrush rustles and a young woman emerges from the bushes, with blood-matted hair and gore streaked down her face. She’s pulling herself on her arms because something has torn off her legs. Tattered, bloody stumps trailing behind her.

Lecter crouches down and beckons to her with an outstretched hand. She moans. She drags herself up the grass towards him with desperately grasping fingers, with her mouth opening and shutting like a hungry bird. She touches his shoe. Lecter murmurs something too soft for Will to hear and then puts a crossbow bolt through her head. 

Will flinches so hard it knocks his teeth together. Lecter retrieves the bolt, wipes it clean on the grass and walks back to the jeep. His face is a blank mask, free from pleasure or regret.

“You killed her,” Will chokes out.

“We will talk in the car.”

“No, no way, I’m – I’m not desperate enough for this.” Keeping the gun pointed at Hannibal, he backs away from the jeep and out into the road. He laughs bleakly. “I’ll take my chances out here, thanks. The hospital knows I’m missing.”

Lecter breathes out slowly through his nose. His lips are pressed together thinly, his face is pale. He looks around them at the silent trees and he nods to himself.

“Will, what do you think has happened?”

He sounds amused. Will glares at him, but Lecter’s face is turned away, his eyes on the receding road. Will is tired. He licks his dry lips.

“I think there’s been some kind of – of outbreak. The city was under quarantine, but it... didn’t hold. I’m – I don’t know. Chemical warfare? I thought, maybe... martial law. But if you’re openly walking around with a crossbow, shooting women in the head... I guess that didn’t work either.”

He drifts into silence. His limbs feel heavy, the weight of the gun slowly dragging his arm down. He jerks it up again, correcting his aim.

“And you’re still here,” he says. “You didn’t evacuate.”

Lecter inclines his head. “Why do you think that is?”

“Maybe you enjoy it. This – this reek of death. You sniffed out that girl, didn’t you? You could smell her sickness.”

Will’s lip curls. Lecter remains silent, smiling faintly and politely, utterly inscrutable beneath Will’s gaze. Somehow his face is less human than Sharpe’s face.

“But there’s no sport, is there,” Will murmurs, “in hunting sick people. I think you like to watch bright lights go out. Tell me what’s happened.”

“This is no mere sickness,” Lecter says. “This is death.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean precisely what I said.”

WIll shakes his head. He rubs the back of his hand over his eyes and drags the weight of the gun back up again. He snarls, “No riddles, Lecter. _Explain_.”

Lecter smiles. “You are tired and injured, so I shall forgive the rudeness. Perhaps you require a practical demonstration?”

“Of what?”

Lecter walks out into the centre of the road and Will backs away from him, his heart beating like a drum. The sun is almost fully risen, and the light is bright and hazy; Lecter shields his eyes with a hand, looking up and down the road. He breathes in deeply.

“Of the dead,” he says. “Please fire your weapon.”

Will stares at him. Lecter’s expression is placid. A deep, dark, cold lake with a surface as smooth as a mirror. Will fleetingly imagines shooting out the jeep’s tyres; shooting out a window; shooting out that mirror to see what it is that swims beneath.

He looks away, lifts his arm, takes a breath and fires a shot into the trees. The crack of gunfire rips through their heavy silence, reverberating down the road for long seconds afterwards. Will’s hand shakes. He lowers the gun. He stares at the treetops until the silence rolls back in again like fog. 

“No birds,” he breathes.

“No,” Lecter agrees.

They meet each other’s eyes for one brief moment, listening, and then a groan rises up from the trees and Will turns away. There is a figure emerging slowly onto the roadside ten feet away. It starts to stagger in Lecter’s direction, its one remaining arm outstretched and grasping. Its mouth is open. Half its face is grey and rotten; the other half is gone.

“Leprosy?” Will asks numbly. “Some kind of flesh-eating bacteria?”

“I have already told you what it is,” Lecter says, lifting his hunting rifle.

Firing in rapid succession, before Will can even react, he blasts off the figure’s remaining arm – splattering thick, black blood across the ground – shoots out its kneecaps, and lands a few final shots in the centre of its chest. Lecter lowers the rifle again, nodding to himself. The figure collapses slowly to the ground.

Will is rushing forwards before he is even aware of his own movement, crossing the short distance to the fallen body with his ears ringing and his throat tight. He drops down onto his knees, skids, feels the knees of his jumpsuit tear, and comes to a halt beside the body. His hands hover over it. He stares.

The final blasts have left a deep crater in the chest, wet and rotting flesh caved in around the wound. Will can smell it. They were young, Will thinks, from what he can tell of what remains of the face. The eyes are still open, staring up at the sky as blank and cloudy as Sharpe’s eyes had been.

“I’m sorry,” Will whispers. “I’m so sorry this happened to you.”

He reaches down to close those staring eyes. The body jerks upwards, its teeth snapping towards Will’s lowered hands, and in the same moment Lecter grabs Will by the scruff of the neck and drags him backwards. The teeth close on empty air. Pushing Will aside, Lecter grabs the body’s hair and drags its head back down to the ground, neck exposed, the meat cleaver swinging down to meet it in one long arc that catches the sun.

Will throws a hand over his eyes, but he can still hear it. The wet chop. The metallic scrape of blade hitting tarmac. He presses his forehead into his bloody knees.

“Look,” Lecter tells him sharply.

Will slowly lowers his hand and lifts his head. Lecter is gazing down at him with his face devoid of emotion; in his hand he has the decapitated head, held up by its hair. Its mouth is still opening and closing, soundless now at least, its eyes rolling madly in its necrotic face.

“No,” he says blankly.

“Do you wish to put an end to it?” Lecter says.

When Will does nothing but stare, he adds, with an odd twist of his lips, “It is mid-morning, you are on the outskirts of Baltimore, your name-”

“Do they still feel pain?” Will asks. “Or – or anger, love, jealousy, _anything?_ Is there – is nothing left?

“Nothing is left.”

Will stares up at the head, which is still swinging furiously in Lecter’s grip. Something black is dripping from between its lips with every furious champ of its jaws; from the stump of its neck with every jerk of its head.

“You must destroy the brain,” Lecter says, “if you wish it to cease. They are mindless and driven by hunger, drawn by scent and sound. Their bite is infectious. They devour any meat that crosses their path. Do you wish,” he punctuates the question with a shake of the head, “to make it cease?”

Will nods.

Lecter carefully lowers the head onto the ground. It immediately starts to rock back and forth in tiny, useless movements, its cloudy gaze fixed on Lecter’s ankles. Lecter steps back. The head rolls sideways and for a moment Will can only watch it. He can’t move. There is no ground beneath his feet anymore. Then he forces himself upright and he takes careful aim. With his eyes closed, he pulls the trigger. 

The head, at last, goes still.

“I’m sorry,” Will says again.

He lets the weight of the gun drag his arm back down to his side. When he turns around, Lecter is standing by the open passenger door, watching him.

“Please get in,” he says.

Will doesn’t want to get in, but nor does he want to be left behind with Lecter’s practical demonstration and the girl with no legs. With Sharpe’s cleaved head, and the two dead kids in the yellow and white pyjamas, and the beckoning hand in the trees.

All these ghosts that he collects. No wonder then, that he called Lecter back to haunt him again.

“More will be coming,” Lecter says. “I insist.”

Will climbs into the jeep. Lecter closes the door behind him, walking around the jeep to the driver’s side. Will closes his eyes. And there is the head, its exposed throat dripping. Will opens his eyes and the head disappears. He turns his face to see Lecter watching him from the driver’s seat. When he catches Will’s eye, he slowly lifts his hands away from the wheel, palms held out, fingers spread in soothing placation.

“I am going to lock the doors,” he says, voice soft, “for our own safety. You are free to leave the vehicle whenever you choose, if you still prefer your chances out there. But I warn you, the choice is final. I will not come back for you once you are gone. Do you understand?”

“I understand,” Will echoes. “I’m warning you, I’ll shoot you if I think I have to.”

Lecter smiles at him, with teeth. “I too understand. In the head, please, Will.”

He starts the engine and pulls out into the road. Another blood-streaked figure is staggering out of the trees behind them, moving too slowly to give chase. Will watches it in the wing mirror, until they round a bend and the trees swallow it whole. He closes his eyes again.

“I’m not a killer,” he says.

“We shall see.”


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So sorry about the long, long delay.
> 
> I wildly underestimated the length of this fic when I first plotted it out, so I've upped chapters from 3 to 5 and split what would have been chapters 2 and 3 into two parts for consistent chapter length reasons. The next chapter is almost finished and chapter 4 is underway.

A hand on his face.

 

*

 

Will hears his name. He opens his eyes. The light is still dim and his arms ache, and with a groan he rolls over onto his side, thinking he can get at least another minute’s rest before they order him up onto his feet. He only needs a minute longer and then he will stand and accept that plastic breakfast tray pushed through the slot in the door, the plastic spoon, the meal that might as well be plastic too.

And he is incredibly hungry, despite the headache.

Someone takes hold of his shoulder, rolling him gently down onto his back again. Someone shines a light back and forth into his eyes. Will lifts a heavy hand to bat it away.

“I’m sorry, Will,” they say. “But it is necessary. You may sleep again soon, if you like.”

“No breakfast?” Will groans, squinting against the light.

The flashlight goes out, the afterimage of the bulb wavering in his vision like a black hole. He blinks in the sudden darkness until he can see again and then he stares at the antique candlestick on the antique bedside cabinet next to his head. The dark green wallpaper, the boarded up window, the flickering candlelight. The hand on his shoulder. He swallows thickly.

“Keep your eyes on me,” Lecter says.

He takes hold of Will’s chin and carefully turns his head from side to side, holding Will’s gaze. Will stares at the flecks of candle flame reflected in Lecter’s eyes.

“Do you remember where you are?”

Will nods.

“And you remember why?”

Will nods again. Lecter smiles at him and lets go of his chin. He’s sitting on the edge of the bed, the hand on Will’s shoulder pressing him down into the mattress, but only lightly. Over Lecter’s shoulder, a half-open door and a dimly lit corridor. Will could run now, maybe, through that door and down the stairs and out into –

Into the car with the broken window, with the corpses in the back seat in yellow pyjamas? Into the waiting, gaping mouth of the prison bus? Will closes his eyes and breathes in through his nose. When he opens his eyes, Lecter is still there; still faintly smiling.

“With rest,” Lecter says, “you will make a full recovery. Take care that you do yourself no further harm. There are no more hospitals here. Another head injury could be fatal.”

“Are you threatening me?”

Lecter gazes down at him, his dark eyes roving back and forth across Will’s face. Then the corner of his lips curl upwards again and he squeezes Will’s shoulder, once, with great and deliberate care.

“You will know, Will,” he says, “when I am threatening you. Now, I’ll bring you some breakfast, if you wish. You must be hungry.”

“Fine.” 

Ever the gracious host, Lecter inclines his head and climbs to his feet. He exits the room and disappears down the corridor, leaving the bedroom door open behind him; Will can hear his footsteps receding: ten steps to the stairs, and twelve down them, and then the distant echo across the foyer until a door opens and closes behind him. 

He wanted Will to hear every step.

Will can still feel the ghost of Lecter’s hand on his shoulder. The ghost of a human touch.

Perhaps he wanted Will to follow him.

Will lurches upright too quickly, his head swimming. The bed sheets tangle around his legs. Silk coverlet, luxurious pillows. As if he were an honoured guest. He kicks himself free, staggers across the room and steadies himself against the wall. He stares down at his left hand where it rests on the wallpaper: someone has set his dislocated thumb in a splint and bandaged it. The cuffs still dangling from his right wrist. The shackles still around his ankles, although someone - _Lecter_ , with a bone saw; Lecter, with a gentle touch and a steady hand – has cut away the chains that fastened them together. 

Will can remember in vague flashes the journey from the crash to Lecter’s house; the memories float in muddled impressions of movement and sensation, dislocated from the passage of time. He touches the edge of the clean, white bandage. He has no idea how long he has spent here, drifting in and out of sleep. 

Trailing his fingers along the wall, he follows the edge of the room to the boarded up window. There are gaps between the boards, filled with thin slivers of light. Will presses his face against a crack and peers through with narrowed eyes. At first he sees only light, and then a flicker of movement, and then a wide blue eye stares back at him through the gap.

Will jerks his head back so fast he staggers again. He braces his hands on the window sill and breathes in jerky gasps. 

“Will,” Abigail whispers from the other side of the glass.

He can hear her fingers scrabbling at the edges of the window pane. A fingernail scraping against glass.

“Will,” she whispers again. “It’s locked.”

“I know,” he starts to say. His voice cracks and dies on the second syllable, his mouth gone dry. He clears his throat and tries again. 

“I know this isn’t real.” 

Abigail goes silent once more.

Will rubs his hands over the windowsill, staring down at the backs of his knuckles. The wood is solid and real.

Straightening up, he turns away from the window and staggers over to the wardrobe. Inside, there hangs nothing but an old camel hair coat and a row of empty coat hangers. He rifles through the coat pockets, runs his fingers along the top of the wardrobe and finds nothing. He searches the bedside cabinet, tugs open the chest of drawers and probes inside each empty drawer for secret compartments, and then he crouches on the floor and feels under the bed. There is nothing to be found. 

Panting for breath, Will rocks forwards on his knees and rests his forehead against the edge of the mattress. He inhales slowly, holds and releases. Lecter has his gun.

“Okay,” he says.

The room spins when he climbs back onto his feet. By now it must be a few days since he last ate a proper meal, he figures, and the ache has settled deep inside his body. He’s been in a road accident, he’s fought for his life. Probing along the line of his jaw with his fingertips, he finds a swollen, tender bruise.

If Lecter wanted him dead, Will would already be dead.

“Okay,” he says again.

He edges to the half-open door. The heavy key is still in the lock and the corridor beyond is long and dim, lit by a small propane lantern on a side table. Will tries the door opposite his, holding his breath when the hinges creak, and he finds himself in a dark bathroom with boards over the windows. The medicine cabinet is empty, but he could break the mirror if he has to. Water splutters weakly from the faucet when he twists it, but it’s enough to slurp from cupped hands and splash onto his face. He digs his wet knuckles into his eyes.

“I’d like to wake up now,” he says, with a tremulous laugh.

Lowering his hands, he straightens up and stares into the mirror over the sink. He sees himself as a shadow among the shadows, a black figure in the faint light cast through the bathroom door. He lifts his hand and the black figure in the mirror slowly does the same.

With a shudder, Will drops his hand and turns away.

Back out in the corridor, there is the scent of something savoury in the air, the smell so rich after two months of institutional meals it makes his stomach turn. He tiptoes down the corridor, trying the doors as he goes. Everything else is locked. The only path to take is the one that leads to Lecter.

Will teeters at the end of the corridor. He closes his eyes and sees Lecter’s face: Lecter, in the kitchen, unconcerned. Lecter, fussing over his presentation as though this is just another ordinary day and their world hasn’t changed between one breath and the next; or rather, to him the change is still new and interesting, a fresh diversion to pass the time he would ordinarily have spent on - _other_ pursuits. This brave new world has a primal thrill, a scent of blood that never fades away, a chance to briefly let his true face show.

Alone, the thrill would soon wear off. Alone, Lecter would start to yearn for company, and entertainment, and the last desperate dregs of civilisation. For bright lights to snuff out.

But then, Lecter is no longer alone.

Will opens his eyes and finds himself back in front of the bedroom door, staring down at the key in the lock.

He doesn’t take it. Instead he closes the door behind him and heaves the heavy chest of drawers in front of it, freezing at every loud scrape it makes as it drags over the floorboards. He holds his laboured breath and listens for any sound of movement downstairs. Lecter must know what he is doing. Perhaps Lecter knew the moment he left the key in the lock that Will would find some other way to shut himself inside.

It’s even darker with the door closed. Chest of drawers in place, Will slumps against the wall and lets himself slide down it to lean against the drawers. He puts the candlestick at his feet, the orange glow before him like a campfire. The outer edges of the room sink into shadows that sway gently back and forth to the rhythm of the candle flame. Will is panting, his hair sweat damp. He listens for the sound of Lecter’s feet on the stairs. The walls swell and shrink around him like a giant pair of lungs. He’s lodged inside the chest cavity. Somewhere close must be the heart. The rhythmic, thumping heart.

Yes, he can hear it now.

“Will,” Lecter says, just outside the door.

Footsteps, Will realises. He swallows hard and the walls stop breathing. He rubs his hand down his face. Only the thump of Lecter’s footsteps.

“I shall leave your breakfast by the door,” Lecter continues. “You can collect it when you’re ready. Please take care not to scratch the floorboards when you rearrange the furniture.”

Tipping his head back to touch the door frame, Will listens to the gentle clink and scrape of Lecter placing the plate on the floor. He can smell the food, so rich it catches in his throat even as it makes his mouth water. He can see Lecter’s face behind his eyes, curious, inscrutable. A fingertip runs along the edge of the door; a fingernail scrapes against the hinges next to Will’s head.

Lecter could take the door off, Will knows. If he wanted to.

Instead Lecter sighs very softly, wood and plaster all that separates his mouth from Will’s ear. Linen rustles as he straightens up again.

“There are matches out here, Will,” he says. “If you decide you need them.”

He leaves, but the sound of his footsteps lingers behind, growing louder instead of softer. A thumping beat in Will’s ears in time with his heart. After all, why destroy the burrow, when you can lure the creature out into the open. All it takes is patience and a little bait.

He could break a leg off the bedstead and swing it like a bat. He could wield the candlestick or the lamp, prise off the boards from the window and leave the nails protruding, break the window itself and plunge the glass into Lecter’s face and strangle him with his camel hair coat.

Will gags, no longer so hungry. 

He could prise the boards off the windows, break the glass and climb out into this altered world. No matter what choice he makes, he knows he’s going to die. 

The candle gutters. He holds his hand out over the flame and watches the shadow of his hand thrown huge across the ceiling, fingers spread wide, wavering and dancing, reaching down towards him like the hand of God.

 

*

 

And then it is dark.

Will opens and closes his eyes but the darkness remains the same. 

He has vague memories of the continuing passage of time; of dozing and waking; of Lecter’s low voice through the door that separates them. He remembers the flickering candle flame.

Moving stiff limbs, he runs his hands over the floor he’s sitting on, the wall he’s leaning against, the dresser beside him. He nudges the candlestick with his feet and pulls back too late, sending it clattering across the floor; the hard metal clank of the candlestick, the quick rattle of the candle. He swipes his hands back and forth across the floor, but they have rolled far out of his reach.

He has lost all sense of time.

“My name is Will Graham,” he whispers. “I’m... I’m in Baltimore. I’m awake and I’m alive. This is real.”

He leans back against the wall again and blinks until he’s certain his eyes are open. The shadows shift and dance around him in a million different shades of black. The air is cold.

A floorboard creaks out in the corridor behind him, and Will’s whole body stiffens: listening for the sound of Lecter’s soft footsteps, perhaps already bored of waiting; listening with equal dread for the sound of hooves.

Another floorboard creaks, the definite shift of a human body, but from inside the room this time. Will holds his breath. Hears, gently, gently, the sound of fingers scratching from inside the wardrobe.

“Will,” Abigail whispers.

He shakes his head.

“Will,” she says again.

Her fingernails scrape against the hinges. He can hear her rattling breath. With a low groan, the wardrobe door swings slowly open and he feels the air move against his face. Something slithers – the sound of a body dragging across the floor.

“Don’t,” he stutters. “Don’t get out.”

She goes still.

The floorboard in the corridor creaks again. Will stares at the shadow in the shadow in the shadows. 

“Did you like it?” Abigail says.

“What?”

“I have another ear,” she whispers. “If you decide you need it.”

 

*

 

Lying on his back, with his cheek pressed against the floorboards, Will can see under the drawers to the thin line of light beneath the bedroom door. He can watch Lecter come and go through the shadows he casts on the floor, retrieving the cold breakfast plate, bringing up fresh food. He watches Lecter crouch down outside; his body blocks the light between floor and door and he brushes a finger along the gap, as if checking the floorboards for dust.

Behind his eyes, Will drifts back five years to find Millie the old basset hound that had dragged herself under the porch. He reaches down into that dark hole again and strokes her greying snout, mud soaking through the knees of his jeans, rain dripping down the back of his neck. She nips at his hand, but he doesn’t let her go, he doesn’t leave her alone. He can feel the grass again. The cold wind brings stinging tears to his eyes.

Millie’s grey nose fades from view.

Perhaps this is all that remains of the world. Perhaps they are all that is left: Will’s body on the floorboards and Lecter’s shadow in a narrow band of light. Will lowers his outstretched hand. He brushes the rain from his face. This is not the way he’s going to die, quiet and diminished, in a darkened room. He will not wait for the end like an injured animal.

He hauls himself unsteadily up onto his feet, leaning on the side of the chest of drawers. The room rocks for a moment, the blackness contracting around him as if to squeeze him out, but then Will rights himself. He grabs hold of the edge of the drawers and hauls it away from the door. Inch by inch. His arms shake. The dresser scrapes across the hardwood floor. He pulls it back just far enough that, if he wanted to, he could open the door just wide enough to fit his body through the gap.

Will stares down at the doorknob. Fleetingly, he sees Lecter’s face on the other side of the door, staring down at the other side of the doorknob. He feels the dizzying sensation that they are occupying the same body; that if Will were to lift his hand now, Lecter, a black figure, separated from him by air and wood and air again, would slowly do the same. 

He shakes his head and the sensation passes. The mirror fades away, the door becomes a door again and it is Will, alone in his body, who lifts his hand and pulls the door open. And then they are separated only by air.

“Doctor Lecter,” he says.

“Hello, Will.”

Lecter bows his head in acknowledgement. He gestures down the hall with a flourish, like a maître d' at a high class restaurant. 

“Would you like the grand tour?” 

Will has never been to a high class restaurant. He remains motionless in the doorway, his fingers digging tighter into the door frame to hold himself steady, and he watches Lecter smoothly lower his hands again. The closest he’d ever gotten to fine dining was under this roof, seated at the esteemed Dr Lecter’s dinner table, picking at unfamiliar dishes with the wrong fork, while Lecter watched him with an indulgent smile.

A snapshot rises up in him unbidden: the tines of the fork against his lips; the tang of jus on that first tender bite of meat; and then glancing up to see for one brief second the satisfaction flaring like bright light in the bottomless depths of Lecter’s eyes. He views the memory now as if through a dark pane of glass, distant and indistinct. Something on the tip of his tongue.

He is very hungry.

“No,” Will says, “I’d like something to _eat_.”

Lecter smiles at him again. “Of course.”

He leads the way through the dark corridors. Every window they pass has been boarded up tightly, the hallways lit with propane lanterns, and the air is stuffy. The house is silent.

“I have a standby generator for my freezers in the basement,” Lecter confides, holding the door to the kitchen open for Will, “but I don’t wish to overtax it.”

Will follows at a distance, taking in the layout of the house; he had been too self-conscious and polite as Lecter’s guest, in that distant former life, to venture outside of the rooms Lecter had led him into. The rest of the house sits like an iceberg, unknown and untouched. 

He lingers in the entrance hall. He can hear the generator hum, deep below the surface of the water.

“Will?”

Lecter is waiting in the doorway, radiating nothing but patient curiosity. Will follows him inside. 

 

*

 

“It began in Europe perhaps two months ago,” Lecter says. He presses his fingertips together and rests his chin on top of them, watching Will take the first bite of the sandwich Lecter constructed for him with thick, pink slices of ham. 

Will chews slowly, despite the hunger roiling in his gut. He counts to twenty before he lets himself swallow, keeping his eyes fixed on Lecter all the while, Lecter keeping his eyes fixed on Will in return. He smiles to himself when Will takes another bite.

“The first rumours came from the Baltic States. By all accounts, it started slowly – spreading westward from Russia, I believe. The riots in central Europe were easily dismissed as another facet of the Eurozone crisis. When the first incidents reached these shores, they were blamed on drugs. By the time the American government finally accepted what was happening, it was of course too late. The disease has a 100 per cent fatality rate.”

He pauses to let out a soft sigh. His face is a lugubrious mask of grief. Will keeps slowly chewing.

“Martial law failed and gradually collapsed. It’s fortunate you weren’t present for the worst of it – emotions ran very high. People died in the hysteria.”

“Fortunate,” Will echoes.

Lecter’s lips twitch.

“Yes,” he says. “Fortunate.”

“You think that if you hadn’t framed me for murder, I’d probably be dead by now.”

“Do you disagree?”

“Do you expect me to be grateful?”

Lecter shrugs, with a sangfroid roll of his shoulders. 

“I wouldn’t presume to tell you how to feel,” he says.

Will snorts. He crams the last corner of the sandwich into his mouth. Despite everything, Lecter’s cooking is still delicious and he’s too hungry to pretend otherwise. He runs his finger around the plate, collecting stray crumbs.

“Killed anyone else yet?” he asks around his mouthful.

Lecter’s eyebrows twitch upwards. He rubs his thumb along the edge of the table, admiring the grain of the wood. He says, blandly, “I have taken steps to defend my home.”

“That was what you did with me, wasn’t it?” Will spits the words out. “Took steps.”

“I did what was necessary.”

“Necessary? Abigail-” Voice breaking, he shakes his head.

“Jack knew too much, Will. She would have been tried as an adult and gone to prison, not to the Baltimore State Hospital like yourself; she was perfectly sane. Did you want that for her?”

“I wanted her to _live._ ”

“To live to see this?”

“No, I - Don’t put that on me. Nobody could ever want this.”

“No,” Lecter agrees. He ducks his head down and leans across the table to catch Will’s eye. “Will, you must let go of this obsession. There is no FBI to investigate, no court to prosecute, no jail to confine. We are all that remains. There is nobody else left.”

“You don’t know that for certain.”

“True. Perhaps Jack chose to put his dear Bella through all the stress and rigmarole of evacuation. Perhaps Alana set aside her scepticism and practicality in time to face what was really happening. But can you really imagine you will find them again, in this wide and altered world?

“There is little you can do now, Will,” he says, voice soft. “Unless you intend to be judge, jury _and_ executioner?”

“I intend to find out the truth. What you did to me. What you did to – Abigail.”

“It’s natural to look for meaning in the midst of trauma and upheaval.”

Smiling sardonically, Will says, “Go to Hell.”

Lecter stands. His chair legs scrape against the floor and Will flinches back in his own seat, fingernails digging into the palms of his hands. He could smash the empty plate in Lecter’s face, if he has to. If this truly is it. But Lecter walks right past him. Will waits, for a split second, for the arm to snake around his neck and squeeze; when it doesn’t come, he turns to see Lecter holding a bottle of water out to him.

“We can’t be sure the tap water is safe to drink any longer. This has been purified. It hasn’t been poisoned,” he adds, when Will hesitates to take it.

“Thanks,” Will says tautly.

The plastic bottle is warm and the water inside tastes slightly stale, but he gulps it down. When he lowers the half-empty bottle, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand, Lecter is still gazing down at him.

“Give it back,” Will says.

“Give what back?”

“The gun.”

“Firearms are inadvisable now, Will. The noise only draws attention.”

“I told you, I’ll shoot you if I have to.”

“I remember.”

Lecter heads for the door, then pauses, looking back at Will. “Our time with Abigail had reached a natural conclusion,” he says. “I gave her the kinder death.”

Will is pinned into place by Lecter’s gaze. He lifts his chin and clenches his jaw. 

“Death isn’t kind.”

“Good night, Will,” Lecter says, turning away and walking out the door. 

Will stays frozen, listening to his departing footsteps. He could leave. He could run. Lecter had said he wouldn’t come back for him. There have to be other people out there. They can’t be alone. He flattens his palms on the tabletop and breathes.

When he is certain that Lecter has gone, he grabs a carving knife from the block, wraps it in a dishcloth and treads softly back to his room. That night he sleeps in fits and starts, with his back against the wall and his fingers wrapped around the handle of the knife.

 

*

 

In the morning, the light shines milky and pale through the gaps between the boards. Will can imagine the overcast sky, the first light touches of frost on the leaves, the clear scent of cold air. It’s perfect weather to let the dogs out for a long run. He whistles sharply through his teeth the way his father taught him, calling them home again.

A blink and he’s back in Lecter’s quiet, dark house.

When he drags himself up and pulls the door open, Lecter is once again waiting on the other side, with a breakfast plate in his hand.

“Powdered eggs, I’m afraid,” he confides, looking sheepish – as if _this_ were his one grievous sin. “But the sausages, I made myself.”

Will shrugs, uncaring. He grabs the proffered plate and fork and eats as slowly as he can make himself, savouring every careful bite. He recognises the taste of the dish the moment it hits his tongue: the flavourful sausages, the perfectly seasoned egg, from the first time they ate together. He raises an eyebrow at Lecter with his mouth full.

Smiling, Lecter watches him scrape the plate clean.

“Feeling sentimental, Lecter?” Will asks with a sneer, passing the plate back.

“The recipe is a personal favourite.”

“The world’s falling apart, but you still handmake your sausages. There’s something... sickly comforting in that.”

“Proof that not everything has changed,” Lecter says. “We are still ourselves. It’s natural to take comfort in the familiar. I have always kept my freezers well-stocked, and by chance I had been preparing for a dinner party when the situation became apparent. It was a sick comfort. I lived off foie gras and quail eggs for a number of days, while outside civilisation crumbled.”

Will snorts with laughter and Lecter’s lips quirk upwards in return. They stand and regard each other for a moment; Will’s body blocking the way into the room, Lecter’s the way out.

“What do you want?” Will says.

“Your help, if you’re willing.”

“And if I’m not?”

“Then, regrettably, we will be at an impasse,” Lecter says. “If you mean to remain here, Will, you will need to work with me. You’re an additional mouth to feed, and reinforcing the defences and replenishing supplies would be more efficient with a second pair of hands. We will need to compromise.”

“And in return?”

“You survive.”

“Fine. Anything else?” 

“Only a friendly request. I ask that you call me by my first name while you’re a guest in my house. It would be polite,” he adds, after a moment’s pause, in response to whatever has slipped through to show on Will’s face.

Will swallows down the sudden, wild burst of laughter that bubbles up inside of him.

“I suppose you’ve killed people for less.”

“Perhaps,” Lecter says. “But never you.”

 

*

 

He leads Will down to the foyer, as he had done so many times before - before the betrayal, before the Baltimore State Hospital for the Criminally Insane, before this life. At the front door, he pauses to pass Will a dust mask like the kind used on construction sites, but stained on the front with specks of dark, dark red. He shoots Will a sideways look while he fits a mask of his own into place.

“It won’t pleasant,” he says, voice muffled.

“I’m used to unpleasantness.”

With a nod, Lecter turns back to the door. He tugs a chain out from around his neck with half a dozen keys rattling at the end of it, selects one indistinguishable from the others and slots it into the keyhole. The lock clicks. Lecter had locked them in, Will realises. He had locked then both inside.

He tries to memorise the shape of the teeth, the position on the chain, when Lecter pulls the key out and tucks the chain back inside his shirt again. If Will stole the keys. If he locked the doors and set this house on fire, neither of them would get out in time.

Lecter is watching him. When Will meets his eyes, he pushes open the front door.

The first thing is the smell. Will walks down the steps into the front yard, breathes in the heavy stench of putrefaction and just barely lifts his mask from his mouth before he doubles over coughing. 

“You’ll get used to it in time,” Lecter says.

Straightening up, Will spits and wipes his mouth and mutters, “Something to look forward to.”

The second thing is the wall. Lecter’s artful, understated front yard is long gone, the bushes ripped out, the low brick wall demolished; in its place towers an eight foot high wall of concrete blocks, casting a shadow over the bare yard. There is a gap at one end, where the concrete should meet the brick of Lecter’s house, as though some huge mouth has leaned down and taken a bite from it. And there is a row of metal spikes lining the top of the wall, impaled with rotting chunks of meat.

In the golden light of the pendulum’s arc, Will sees the cleaver swinging down, hacking the bodies apart with calmness and with ease.

“You-” he says and gags again.

The air is cold and the sun is bright and he can hear the buzzing of a thousand flies.

“These were the infected,” Lecter explains.

“You prised open Dr Sutcliffe’s jaw with equal violence,” Will spits out. “Impaled Marissa Schurr on other spikes on other walls.”

“I did.”

Will paces away from him, shaking his head. He walks along the edge of the wall and stares up at every body part he passes. He catalogues every detail. Black male torso, mid-sixties. White male thigh, fractured femur, thirties. Someone needs to see it. Someone needs to know these people. White female head, eighteen or nineteen, wind-chafed, auburn hair.

Its eyes are missing. So is an ear. Will stares up into the black, rotting holes where the eyes used to be and feels his heart thump. It’s Abigail’s head, the great gash in her neck still oozing, the remains of her lips still moving as she twists on her spike to stare back down at him.

“Will,” she says, and a half-chewed ear slides out of her mouth.

“They don’t seem to hunger for their own flesh,” Lecter is saying, close behind him.

Will closes his eyes. When he opens them again, the head remains, eyeless and decomposing; it’s not Abigail anymore, at least.

“Pity,” he chokes out. “Save us some trouble.”

“They aren’t pack animals. Although an over-abundance of fresh meat in one place seems to override the instinct and induce a mass feeding-frenzy, they otherwise tend towards solitude. I’ve found they stay away from the scent of their own kind. Less competition, I believe.”

“Maybe they just want to be alone.”

Huffing in amusement, his breath on the back of Will’s neck, Lecter says, “Perhaps.”

Will quickly steps forwards and away. Without looking back at Lecter, he paces down the length of the wall. The gap at the end is five feet wide, patched up from the outside with a sheet of corrugated iron. Another iron sheet leans up against the side of Lecter’s house. Around them, the yard is scattered with construction paraphernalia, shovels and tarpaulin and crooked stacks of unused concrete blocks, hastily abandoned.

Will turns back to Lecter at last.

“What do you want?”

“With your help, we should be able to adequately reinforce the gap,” he says, gesturing to the blocks and corrugated iron. “I commissioned the new wall when the rumours first reached my ears. Unfortunately, when said rumours reached my builders’ ears, they decided the work was no longer worth their time.”

“You believed it from the start? That the - the dead were rising?”

“I believed that _something_ was happening.” He taps the side of his nose. “I could smell it.”

The smell doesn’t fade, but Will learns to bear it.

They work in terse silence, slotting the spare blocks into the gap in the wall and heaving the corrugated iron sheet in front of it. Lecter drills the sheet into place in short, sharp bursts, while Will presses his weight against the metal. They pause every few seconds to hold their breath and listen. The sound of the drill is impossibly loud in this world turned so quiet.

Something knocks against the side of the wall and they both go still, watching each other. Lowering the drill, Lecter slowly presses a finger to his lips. The thing bumps again, and groans, and something scrapes against the corrugated iron outside. A hand, Will sees in a flash. A dead, grey hand, prying at the metal that separates them from it. He can smell it.

He takes a half step back, but Lecter very gently takes hold of his elbow, fixing him in place.

“It will pass,” he mouths at Will. “We are perfectly safe.”

The person on the other side of the wall groans again. It drags itself along the corrugated iron until it finds the edge where metal meets concrete, and there it wheezes out a croaking breath. The iron sheet rattles. Will closes his eyes. He isn’t safe.

He listens to the sounds of its dragging footsteps slowly receding.

It will never pass. He will never be safe.


	3. Chapter 3

Something is moving in the dark.

 

*

 

In the grocery store parking lot, there is a body slumped against the side of the store, with his hands tied behind his back and a gaping, festering bite mark on his bicep. What remains of his face is still contorted in fear. Old, dried blood splattered up the wall behind him.

“He was alive when they shot him,” Will says flatly.

“He was infected.”

“He fought them. He didn’t want to die.”

“But there is no cure.” 

Lecter’s hulking, battered jeep is parked diagonally over several parking spaces behind them, with pieces of the infected they ran down on the drive still clinging to the dented grill. Lecter knocks the largest chunks off with the sole of his boot and then turns to scan the deserted parking lot. He keeps his crossbow raised and ready. He looks like a hunter now; a far cry from the sleek man in the pinstripe suits with matching pocket squares. He has a camo jacket and sturdy gloves and a cold, hard look in his eyes. 

He had given Will a similar pair of gloves before they left the house and advised him, with a knowing gaze, to bring along the carving knife that he had borrowed.

Will flexes his gloved fingers now around the handle of that knife. He looks down at the sharp edge. He could do it now; he could make it quick.

“No cure,” Lecter adds, his voice gentle, “save the final one.”

He motions towards the entrance with his meat cleaver. “Shall we?”

Will slings his empty backpack over his shoulder and follows Lecter into the grocery store. The front door had once been glass, but it had gotten smashed weeks ago and ground down to shimmering fragments beneath a hundred frantic pairs of feet. A smear of blood on the empty doorframe. They climb through the hole without bothering to pull the door open.

Inside, the store looks like it was hit by a bomb. The shelves have been ransacked, some knocked over completely, with rice and trampled cereal strewn all over the floor. The abandoned fresh produce has long gone rancid and the air reeks of spoiled food and that all-pervading aroma of death. Martial law. Quarantine. A failing curfew and a rush to stock up for the end of days. Will can almost taste the lingering hysteria. He can hear the echoes of the screams, over the lazy buzzing of one thousand undisturbed flies.

The lights are still on overhead, but they’re flickering.

He heaves a broken magazine stand aside, reaches into an open cash register and picks up a thick wad of bills. It’s probably more money than he has ever held in one hand before.

“No more money,” he says.

“How quickly the rules of society are forgotten.”

“You never played by them anyway.”

Following the sound of the flies, Will peers around a checkout and spots a mottled pair of legs. A bloodstained floral dress. He crouches down to examine the remains: an elderly woman, bruised all over. She was crushed in the panic. Her eyes are closed as if in disbelief.

“I played within the rules,” Lecter replies, crouching down beside him. “I merely bore in mind that it was a game.”

“You’ve done worse than this.”

Lecter’s brow furrows. Leaning forwards, he gently twitches the rumpled dress down to cover her thighs more fully. His expression is one of tender regret.

“Only to those who deserved it,” he says.

“Did Abigail deserve it?”

Lecter looks back up at him. 

“No,” he admits. “Abigail didn’t deserve what happened to her.”

He blinks. There is a bright sheen of tears in his eyes.

“You’re not human,” Will breathes.

He stands and turns away, walking to the entrance of the closest aisle, where a discarded arm lies on the floor in a puddle of days old blood. He listens for any sound and hears only Lecter’s soft footsteps behind him; even Abigail is silent now. Will closes his eyes and pictures a wolf, pacing down the aisle alongside him. 

Opening his eyes again, he picks up a dented can of soup and bowls it down the aisle. It rattles over the debris, swerves to the side and rolls into the bottom of a shelf. The impact echoes through the quiet, empty store.

Something groans in response.

Will and Lecter exchange a glance. With a nod, Lecter draws out his cleaver and Will lifts up his knife and they together pace slowly down the aisle. A small boy shuffles around the corner to meet them, both his arms long gone. His cloudy eyes fix on them and he staggers forwards faster, his mouth wide open, his primary teeth snapping at the air.

“Christ,” Will breathes, lowering the knife again.

“You have to learn to do this, Will.”

“He’s just a kid.”

“It’s not a child anymore,” Lecter murmurs. “It’s a creature.”

“He _was_ a child.”

“Then let him rest. Give him his peace.”

Will lifts the knife.

The boy is dressed in sturdy, practical clothes; laces double-knotted so his sneakers won’t fall off if he has to run. The knots outlived him. Will sees it all in a flash: they were escaping the city. Stopped off in the store to grab those last few vital supplies, but when one of the infected got inside the panic set in. Perhaps his parents turned first. Perhaps they begged him to run or to stop them - to make it cease, to aim for the head - but how could a child do that? How could a child hold down the body that had double-knotted his laces and thrust something sharp down into that beloved skull?

You have to go through the eye, into the soft give of the frontal lobe. Will has done it in his mind a dozen times before.

He blinks and lets the body drop. The knife in his hand is covered in gore all the way up to the heel. He wipes it clean on the leg of his jumpsuit and stares down into the red pit of the boy’s punctured eye.

“The next time will be easier,” Lecter says. “You’ll get used to it.”

“I don’t want to get used to it.”

“It’s a cruel gift of humanity, that we can grow accustomed to all manner of horrors if given time and the will to survive it. We can even grow to love it.”

Will looks down at his hands and finds a matted clump of the boy’s hair and skin still resting in the palm of his glove. He scrapes it off on the edge of a shelf and draws in a shuddering breath.

“I’m not like you,” he spits out. “We split up. You go right, I’ll go left.”

Only once Lecter is out of sight and Will is standing alone in the aisle does he look down at the child at his feet. Beneath the gore, the rot, the dark patches of blood, his face is still so small and young. The lights are flickering overhead.

Shaking himself, Will turns from the body and shoulders his bag.

Throughout the store, the shelves are mostly emptied; what wasn’t bought up in the initial panic was looted in the ensuing hysteria. There are bloody footprints all over the floor. Grabbing whatever he can find that isn’t damaged beyond all use - bags of rice and dented cans, trampled packets of Tylenol - Will crams it all into his bag. He focuses as he goes on the steady sound of Lecter’s footsteps: sometimes close by and sometimes far, but a constant mirror to his own.

He is almost back round to the entrance again when he hears something else; the rattle of metal and the crunch of breaking glass. Will freezes. Lifting his knife up higher and pressing his back to the shelves, he holds his breath and listens. He can’t hear Lecter’s footsteps anymore. For a few seconds there is only silence, then someone knocks hard against the edge of a shelf as if to draw out any infected. They wait a long moment while nothing responds. Will waits with them; in some dark corner of the store, Lecter must be doing the same, until at last there are footsteps and low whispers. 

Will lets out his breath. His heart is still thudding too hard in his chest, but he relaxes his grip on the handle of his knife. Slowly, he edges up the aisle and around the corner to see a young man and woman clutching handguns while they pick through what remains of the store’s meagre offerings. 

“Hey,” Will whispers.

They both startle, pointing their guns on reflex towards the sound of his voice. Will lifts his hands in placation. He tries as best he can to smile, but their expressions don’t relax.

Will sees himself from outside himself: the blue Baltimore State Hospital jumpsuit, with its identification number so like a prison uniform; the streak of blood on his pants leg and the hoop of the handcuff still around his wrist; the face from all those lurid tabloid front pages. The man who ate Abigail Hobbs, standing like a ghost before them with a knife in his hand.

“You’re that-” the man begins.

“It’s okay,” Will says, quickly. “I’m not going to hurt you.”

“Back off,” snaps the woman.

Will nods. Hands still in the air, he backs down the aisle again. They watch him go with cold, wary eyes. They are wondering if they should kill him. Perhaps it would feel as good and as righteous to them as it had to Will when he killed Garret Jacob Hobbs.

“Hold on,” the man says. “What’s in the bag?”

“Nothing dangerous.”

“Like _what?_ ”

“Canned stuff, medical supplies.”

The man and woman share a look. They nod and she advances forwards a few steps, gun raised again.

“Put it down,” she says, “and slide it over here. Slowly. No sudden movements or I swear to God I’ll shoot.”

“Okay, it’s okay.”

Unhooking the bag from his shoulder, he lowers it to the ground with his head bowed. He watches them from under his hair. She could shoot him now anyway; she could just shoot and take the bag and leave his cooling corpse for Lecter to find and, perhaps, avenge. But she stands with her fingers flexing uncomfortably around the grip of her pistol, with the gun barrel wavering from side to side. Her shoulders are too tense for her shooting stance. She’s wearing two pairs of socks so her hiking boots will fit properly and the man behind her is no better. Neither of them were prepared for a life like this.

“You’re scared of me,” Will breathes.

“You’ll be scared of us in a moment, if you don’t-”

The man is cut off mid-sentence by the crack of a crossbow and a thick, wet sound. His head jerks forwards. Will jerks back as if he too has been shot. A red mist fills his vision. He hears the woman scream more in anger than in fear, and then the man falls, with his eyes still open, with his lips still parted on his final words, and his gun clatters to the floor.

Between one frantic heartbeat and the next, Will dives for the gun, grabs it and spins on his knees with his finger on the trigger to point the barrel up at Lecter where he stands, at the opposite end of the aisle with the crossbow in his hands.

“You kill her,” Will says, “and I’ll kill you.”

Lecter takes a deliberate step forwards, eyebrows raised, and Will fires a warning shot into the ground before his feet. He halts again and holds up his hands. He looks amused.

Keeping the gun pointed up at that faint smirk on Lecter’s face, Will glances sideways at the woman. She has slumped down onto her knees on the other side of the body, her hands hovering in the air over her companion’s bloodied face. There is a dazed, distant look in her eyes.

“Go,” Will says.

She lifts her head, but doesn’t move.

“Get out of here,” he snaps, turning the gun on her, and at last she staggers unsteadily to her feet. 

She stares down at him, then turns and stares at Lecter. Lecter is still smirking. She spits at his feet.

“You son of a bitch,” she hisses, but she grabs Will’s bag and runs.

Will can hear her clattering away long after she has disappeared from view. If she was truly alone now, she would have stayed and fought them, risked her life in the chance for revenge; she’s gone to warn the rest of her group that there is a murderous madman on the loose. He lowers the gun, eases his finger off the trigger and breathes in and out slowly. His name is Will Graham; he’s in Baltimore; he’s kneeling in a pool of blood.

“I’ve allowed her to live for now, Will,” Lecter says. “But if she or any of her companions find us again, I will do what is necessary.”

“You do it so easily, don’t you.”

“Yes.”

“Grown to love it.”

Staring at the flecks of blood on the man’s wide open eyes, Will listens to Lecter’s footsteps come closer.

“They were going to kill you, just as easily,” Lecter says. “This is no place for mercy.”

“Who can blame them? Who wouldn’t be scared of the man who killed Abigail Hobbs?”

Lecter’s boots enter his field of vision. He crouches down before Will, balanced on the balls of his feet in the blood, and ducks his head to meet Will’s unwilling gaze.

“Do I scare you, Will?” he asks.

“Perhaps I should just kill you.”

“And then what would you do?”

Will whispers, “I don’t know.”

Lecter sighs and leans forwards. His hand reaches out to Will’s hand across the pool of blood, and with gentle fingers he eases the gun out of Will’s grip. He pats Will’s wrist, then stands and stows the gun away. There is bright red blood on the toes of his boots; sturdy boots, well-worn but high quality. Boots made for hunting. They fit him perfectly.

“Come,” he says. “It will be dark soon.”

He walks through the blood without hesitation. Despite the clothes and food and fripperies, Lecter had always been prepared for a life like this. 

Slowly, Will unfolds himself and climbs up onto his feet. He follows the bloody trail of Lecter’s footprints back out of the store.

 

*

 

He stands in the dark bathroom. The broken faucet is leaking, the sink overflowing with black water, and when he reaches down into the clogged drain he pulls out fistfuls and fistfuls of human bones and human teeth. But no matter how much he pulls out, the water keep pouring, blacker and blacker. It’s up to his knees and it’s as cold as death. Growling in frustration, he grabs the faucet and twists it so hard it comes away in his hand. The floor shakes, the whole house rumbles around him and a great wave of water bursts out of the pipes and crashes down around him, knocking him off his feet. For a long, breathless moment he is submerged, disoriented, helpless against the pull of the current. The water is black. He thinks that he might die. 

His head breaks through the surface as the tidal wave crashes down the stairs into the foyer. It slaps against the walls like waves against rocks, stripping the wallpaper and knocking the boards down from the window. The house groans like a wrecked ship. He can feel the floor tilting sideways below him, gradual at first but growing steeper as the water gushes down towards the basement door. Choking, shaking, he kicks out against the current, but the door bows beneath the weight of the waterfall. It buckles and bursts open and the deluge drags him down, down, through the basement door and into the dark.

He floats in the blackness. The water is as silent as the grave and bodies drift around him like seaweed. He sees Cassie Boyle, the antlers that still protrude from her body encrusted with barnacles. He glimpses Abigail’s pale face through the forest of corpses, blood drifting from the hole in the side of her head and diffusing into the water, until the forest closes in around her again. 

He reaches after her, pushing through the bodies. Slippery limbs brush against his face, floating clouds of long, dark hair catch in his eyes, and then a cold, dead hand grabs hold of his wrist and wrenches him down deeper into the shadows. He twists and thrashes against the grip and turns in the cold water to see the body.

Its eyes are clouded milky-white, its limbs bloated and its macerated skin peeling away from the bone. But it it still recognisably Lecter, and when he tries to pull free, Lecter’s dead grip only tightens around his arm, its fingers pressing in harder and harder until they break through the skin.

And through the cloud of his own blood, he sees Lecter lunging forwards, his mouth opening wind around teeth as sharp and hungry as a shark’s.

When he opens his mouth to scream, the water floods his lungs.

Will heaves himself awake. His eyes snap open and he jerks upright in an instant. He sleeps fully-clothed on top of the bed, his boots on and tightly tied in case he has to run. He grabs his knife from the bedside cabinet, holding it out at the shadows, holding his breath, until he’s certain he’s alone in the dark. 

Outside a storm is raging, but his room is silent as the grave.

He breathes again. Slowly he staggers out of bed, tugs away the chair he keeps propped against the door and looks out into the corridor beyond. The little propane lantern glows gently on the side table, casting a comforting pool of light onto the walls. The corridor is empty. 

Will remembers another storm, years ago; a blackout; that same soft hiss of the gas; and his father’s smiling face in the orange lantern light. Together they had sat and listened to the melancholy howl of the wind, like a lonely monster crying to be let inside.

He remembers that he hadn’t been afraid.

He grabs the lantern from its perch by the door and tiptoes down the corridor with the knife gripped tightly in his other hand. Outside, the wind throws itself against the side of the house. It screams at Will to let it in. Even here in the dark, with all the windows boarded tightly shut, he can so clearly picture all those pounds of flesh pinned into place on the garden wall. A macabre butterfly collection. A medieval battlement. Those disconnected limbs must be jerking in the wind now in one final, false semblance of life.

Do the infected notice the wind, Will wonders as he walks, or feel the sun on their faces. Do they ever pause their deathless shamble to brush rain from their eyes.

Down in the foyer, he tests the basement door. He turns the knob a bare fraction of an inch to keep it from rattling or squeaking, listening hard all the while for the sound of Lecter’s approach or for the sound of crashing waves. He isn’t surprised to find that the door is locked shut; a modern silver lock in the wood and an older brass keyhole beneath it. Two keys, then: small silver and heavy brass, hanging together on the chain around Lecter’s neck. Pressed against his tell-tale heart.

Will presses his ear against the door. This must be where the copycat killer did his work. The wood feels as warm as human skin. He tries to picture the copycat killer and sees only shadows. A man like Lecter, poised and self-assured, copying the work of lesser beings. A man like Lecter, deigning to work from someone else’s design. And to what end? All that effort just to lead Will on a merry dance and then frame him?

He goes back in time. He mounts Cassie Boyle on the antlers; carves open Donald Sutcliffe’s mouth; tugs Carson Nahn’s tongue out of his throat. In the dark corners of his mind, he has done it all a thousand times before. And Lecter did the deeds with perfect calm, without a hair out of place. Will can picture it now, but he can’t see where it begins. What turns a man like that into a monster? A fever, an infection. Something rotten in the bloodstream.

He imagines he can hear a heart beating on the other side of the door. The house is alive and one day it will devour him. 

What turns a man into a monster? 

A bite.

“Cassie wasn’t your first kill,” he whispers.

Will steps back quickly, shaking his head until the only heart he can hear now is his own. When he reaches out a hand to touch the door, the wood is cool and dead again.

And then behind him comes the click of a key turning in a lock.

For all his boots are tightly tied, there is no time to run and no shadows in which to hide. Instead, he picks the lantern back up, presses his back to the wall and turns to face the door.

There is a moment as the front door swings open when Lecter, clad in camo and carrying his crossbow, hasn’t yet fully taken in the sight of WIll standing in the basement doorway in a wavering pool of light, and in that moment Lecter’s face is wide open. Will can read on every inch of skin the bone-deep satisfaction; there is a cant to Lecter’s lips that makes Will’s own traitorous heart thump in sympathetic exhilaration.

For only a moment, and then Lecter steps fully into the foyer and his gaze sweeps over Will and the knife in the lamplight. His face smoothes out into an expression of polite surprise. A wave of cold, dark water, extinguishing the fire.

“Good morning, Will,” he says, closing and locking the door again. “You’re up early.”

“Where were you?”

“I went to check the perimetres.”

Putting his crossbow down on top of the dresser, Lecter turns away from Will. He removes his gloves and folds them neatly in a drawer; his jacket, he hangs on the hatstand by the door.

“Do you suffer from nightmares, Will?” he asks.

“Only when I’m awake.”

Lecter smiles. He pauses in front of the large mirror that hangs over the dresser to straighten his collar in the reflected light of Will’s lantern. He isn’t wearing a tie.

“I confess, I sometimes find it difficult to sleep now. But I find a nightcap often helps, if you care to join me. After all,” he adds, retrieving his crossbow and turning back to Will, “if we are both awake, we might as well be civilised.”

“Can one be civilised,” Will murmurs, “without a civilisation?”

“We can but try.”

 

*

 

Lecter’s home office is smaller than his work office, but no less sumptuous, with varnished floorboards and floor-to-ceiling bookshelves and the walls panelled in a rich, dark mahogany. In the centre of the room stand two leather armchairs, facing each other, and under the boarded-up window stands a vast mahogany desk; Will makes a beeline for it, putting his lantern and knife down on top so he can flick through the old memos and the rolodex of business cards.

“Drink?” Lecter says.

Will looks up to see Lecter prop his crossbow against the wall, open a cabinet and bring out a decanter and two cut glass tumblers. He pours himself two fingers and then shoots Will a questioning look, tilting the decanter in his direction.

“Sure,” Will says. He tugs open the desk drawer and finds a leather-bound journal inside, plush and expensive, the year stamped in gilt on the cover. “Why not? The world’s ending, so let’s have a drink.”

“This doesn’t have to mark the end.”

Snorting, Will riffles through the dates until he catches sight of his own name – their first meeting, noted down in Lecter’s fluid hand. The date was a death sentence. Everything led, somehow, to this. He listens to the clink of glass against glass and the splash of pouring whiskey as he pages through the ensuing weeks, past unfamiliar names and unknown appointments, to the date of his arrest. The rectangle is blank, save for a smudge of black ink in the centre, as though someone had pressed pen to paper and wondered what to write – and then thought better of it.

Will presses the pad of his thumb to the spot of ink. He’s almost surprised when his thumb comes away dry.

“What would you call this, then, if not the end of times?”

“A change. Perhaps even a new beginning,” Lecter says, his voice close and his tone mild. He places one of the tumblers at Will’s elbow on the desk and adds, “Ardberg 1976, Manager’s Choice, from a single sherry cask. Note the distinctive earthy flavour.”

Will barks with laughter, shaking his head. When Lecter motions for him to sit, he laughs again, harsher and harder. He paces back and forth behind the armchair instead, and sips his whiskey, and swallows it with a hiss.

“The dead are walking the earth,” he says. “They’re - they’re eating people.”

“Life is a powerful force, Will. It endures in the harshest conditions. It forces its way through the cracks. It is always fighting for survival.”

“You’ve made it fight.”

“Yes,” Lecter allows. He stands casually, one hand in his pocket and the other wrapped around his glass; his eyes gleam in the lamplight as he watches Will walk. “But I have also fought to survive. And so have you. We are survivors, you and I. We adapt. We evolve.”

“I’m not so adaptable.”

“I think you are.”

“And you know me so well.”

“Yes,” he says again. “I do.”

Will laughs again. It sounds tremulous in his own ears, a shade too manic to be derisive. He paces back the way he came and strokes the spines of Lecter’s books. Lecter’s gaze follows him like the gaze of an old oil painting. It isn’t a real face, Will knows now. It is only an artist’s impression of one.

He had found it soothing, once, how Lecter’s face was smooth and blank and gave so little away. Without the cacophony of another person’s emotions rattling around in his head, Will had felt more clearly his own self in Lecter’s company. For a little while, at least.

Grimacing, he drains his glass.

“How are you coping, Will?”

“Is this one of our conversations?”

“Would you like it to be?”

“No, I would not.”

Lecter nods. He takes a seat in the armchair facing Will, crossing his legs and and holding the whiskey out again. He waits patiently for Will to come to him.

“Then may I ask you a question?” he says, once Will is close enough that he can tip the decanter and refill Will’s glass. “Friend to friend.”

“Fine.”

With a shrug, Will takes the seat opposite. He drums his fingers on the leather armrest and waits, while Lecter crosses his legs and leans back in his chair. They regard each other across the distance.

“Why do you stay here,” Lecter says, “if you hate it so?”

“What else could I do?”

“Leave.”

Will chuckles sardonically. Lecter’s own lips twitch and he motions around them with his glass.

“The world has not shrunk down to only these four walls and the roof above our heads. Certainly it’s dangerous out there, but you could take your chances, find other survivors, rebuild some semblance of a life.”

“And you’d just let me stroll away, would you?”

“I’m no jailor, Will,” Lecter says, a shade reproachfully. “I’ve only ever had your best interests at heart.”

“Thanks to your best interests, Dr Lecter, I’m that FBI agent who went crazy and killed all those people. Can’t see many people welcoming that into their midst. And I can’t leave you alone,” he adds. He looks down into his glass, swirling the whiskey around the bottom; it shines richly in the lamplight. “Better you toy with me than some innocent soul who doesn’t know what you are.”

“Aren’t you an innocent soul?”

With a shrug, Will drains his glass in one long swallow and sets it back down on the side table. Lecter leans forwards across the distance between them to refill it again. They both watch the whiskey pour into the glass.

“Why do you want me here?” Will asks.

Lecter glances up at him. He finishes pouring the drink, slowly rights the decanter and puts it down on the table. He leans back in his chair again, lacing his fingers together around his own drink.

“Why do you think?”

“To gloat?”

Will chuckles to himself at Lecter’s pinched expression. Picking his glass of whiskey back up, he lifts it up high in a toast, with a smirk.

“Someone knows what you are at last, but they can’t do anything about it. No police, no jury, no prison. You’ve gotten off scot-free. That must be exciting, right? That must be a real thrill.”

“And so you think I’m gloating.”

Will shrugs and drinks. Tipsy is still a long way off, but the alcohol has loosened his limbs enough that - if he were in a different place, with a different person, at a different time - he could almost relax. He leans back in his chair and studies the parts of Lecter’s face that the lamplight doesn’t touch. The hollows of his eyes. The side of his nose. The edge of his jaw, in shadow.

“You’re wearing a mask,” Will says. “You seeped into high society, with your opera and dinner parties and your fancy suits. Like a poison. Everything rots around you, Lecter. Everything gets consumed. All those artists and gourmands, with no idea you were tainting them. You love knowing something they don’t know. You – you _feed_ off of it.”

Lecter uncrosses his legs and leans forward in his seat and Will startles back from the movement, as if waking from a dream. But Lecter only reaches for the decanter, top up his glass and gestures wordlessly towards Will. When Will shakes his head, Lecter settles back in his seat again. Recrosses his legs. The shadows slide back across his face.

“I feed off of it?” he echoes, thoughtfully.

“But it’s lonely when you can’t share a secret, isn’t it?” Will breathes. “Can’t ever tell anyone just how clever you really are. How much cleverer than all those lesser beings you hoodwinked. You craved taking off the mask and letting them all know the truth just as much as you enjoyed the charade. That would have been your downfall, in the end. Your admiration of your own cleverness.”

They regard each other across the distance, as they had done so many times before. Lecter’s eyes glitter oddly in the lamplight, red-flecked and flickering. There is something older than humanity in those pinpricks of red light.

“And that is why I want you here?” he says.

“I know _precisely_ how clever you are.”

Will lifts his glass in a sardonic salute and Lecter returns the gesture with the ghost of a smile. Outside, the wind wails against the windows. When Will closes his eyes, he sees his father’s face. The old dog at his feet. A time when Will didn’t live a life suffused with fear. He feels almost peaceful when he speaks.

“Why don’t you just tell me?” he whispers. “You want to, don’t you? You started long before Cassie Boyle. So when did it begin? When did you _evolve?_ Tell me what you’ve done. There’s nobody left but me.”

The lantern hisses in the silence.

“I’m sorry, Will. I can’t in good conscience do that.”

Will opens his eyes again. Lecter gazes sorrowfully back at him.

“Why not? You must be dying to get it all off your chest.”

“What else have you got to live for, if not your investigation? No, I can’t take it away from you. You would have nothing else left.”

“You took everything else from me.”

“But not your life.”

Will snorts with laughter, shaking his head. “Oh, you’ll take that too, in the end.”

In a movement as smooth and as fast as the unsheathing of a knife, Lecter is up out of his chair and crossing the distance between them. It makes Will’s heart jolt, but he holds himself still this time. He holds his hand steady and sips from his glass, watching Lecter out of the corner of his eye – a dark shadow flitting past his field of vision in a near-soundless rustle of linen, a momentary brush of fingertips against Will’s shoulder.

When the fingers don’t then close around his neck, Will turns at last to watch Lecter stroking his fingers over the spines of his books.

“I want you here, Will,” he says, sliding a leather-bound volume from one of the shelves, “because I value your company. You remain because you don’t want to leave.”

“Excuse me?”

Lecter thumbs through the pages until he finds what he is looking for. Picking up a pencil from his desk, he lightly underlines the passage and holds the book out to Will. He waits in silence, his arm extended, his finger marking the page, until Will grudgingly takes it.

“No living creature wants to die alone,” Lecter says. “There is no shame in seeking out companionship when you fear your time is at an end.”

“I’m not seeking companionship, I’m seeking the _truth._ ”

“Of course.”

Lecter carefully lays the pencil back in its proper place. He retrieves his crossbow from where it leans against the wall, nods at Will and walks out of the office. Alone, Will looks down at the book in his hands, flipping it over to read _On the Origin of Species_ lettered in gilt on the spine. The lantern hisses and the wind howls and beneath it all he can almost make out the moans of the dead.

He slowly turns to the marked page, the paragraph of text underlined. _More individuals are born than can possibly survive,_ he reads, _A grain in the balance will determine which individual shall live and which shall die—_

Will snaps the book shut.

 

*

 

“I require your assistance again,” Lecter says in the morning, with breakfast.

“Fine,” Will says around another mouthful of sausage.

Outside, the sun is bright. The sky is pale fall blue, the air clear and cold. It would be a beautiful day, if not for the infected man trapped inside an abandoned car, banging unceasingly on the window. It would be beautiful if not for the job Will has to do.

He swings the axe again. It strikes bone, splattering blood up his protective goggle. He is wearing a dust mask too, and disposable gloves and a clear hazmat suit perfectly tailored to Lecter’s size. 

He heaves the axe back out of the flesh and swings it down again to hit the same mark. This time it cuts through the joint; black sludge oozes out of the severed ends. The scent is putrid. 

“Just how many people have you killed?”he asks.

He picks up the dismembered arm - the flesh cold and too soft, even beneath the plastic gloves - and tosses it back onto the pile of the dead. It’s just flesh, he tells himself. Only meat. Only carbon and calcium. It stopped being a person long ago. These creatures are only the echo of a life.

“More than Garret Jacob Hobbs,” Lecter replies.

He doesn’t look around from his watch duty, sitting on the hood of the car with an elegance that belies the crossbow in his hand. The street is empty. It’s a fancy neighbourhood. Most of the residents probably got out of dodge at the first sign of trouble; most of their cars have gone. You could almost imagine they had all gone on vacation, if you ignored the blood on the streets and the hammering on the car window. The broken glass in the gutter and the bullet marks on the walls. A front door hanging wide open with red handprints on the woodwork.

Will hefts the axe again. He lets it swing. The stuff makes a thick, wet sound when it parts beneath the blade of the axe.

He hears groaning, swiftly followed by the whistle of the crossbow, and he looks up to see Lecter already strolling over to the body. He presses the sole of his boot against the side of the head to hold it steady while he retrieves the bolt; the skull caves in beneath his foot.

It’s not a person, Will tells himself again.

“How did you do this when you were alone?”

Wiping the bolt clean on a rag, Lecter returns to his perch on the car. He says, “Carefully. And with patience. I’m accustomed to fighting for my life.”

“Fighting for someone’s life, anyway,” Will mutters.

He cuts the leg off at the knee and tosses it onto the pile. It isn’t a person. It’s shaped like a person, but it isn’t one. Perhaps this is how Lecter always saw the world. Maybe here at last is his design.

Will lowers the axe and studies Lecter. His hair is greyer than it was in that other, old life. He looks worn.

“No,” he breathes. “There’s something else.”

Lecter shoots him a quizzical look, but says only, “Open the guts. You’ll need to spread the entrails on the wall.”

“You do it.”

“You agreed to cooperate, Will.”

“I’m not your handyman, Lecter.”

The infected man in the car breaks through the window at last. It spills out onto the road and drags itself across the broken glass, its mouth gaping, its wasted arms outstretched, its innards trailing out behind it. Lecter lifts his crossbow and shoots it in the head.

“No,” he says, rising smoothly to his feet. “You are my guest. And you’re frightened of what I might do to other survivors if you’re no longer here to watch me.”

Will breathes out heavily through his nose, watching Lecter stroll away again - as casual as a walk through the park - to retrieve the bolt. He grabs the axe and brings it down with all his strength. It’s only flesh - no, it’s only carbon. It is cells; it is atoms. It comes apart so easily beneath the weight of the axe.

Chest heaving, he tosses the axe aside and dips his gloved hands into the mess. It is cold to the touch. It was never alive. He swipes his fingers in a long, red-black streak down the wall, the stuff clinging easily to the brick. He sets to work.

He’s back in Wolf Trap. He bought his little house for cheap because the previous owner had died alone inside of it, his old heart giving out at last beside the kitchen sink. He had had no family left, no close friends, and he had lain undisturbed for weeks until someone came knocking about his unpaid bills. That kind of thing puts prospective buyers off, but Will didn’t care. The place was run down, but he fixed it back up, stripped off all the peeling seventies wallpaper and bought giant tubs of discount paint. He had redecorated each room so slowly, with such care. With his sleeves rolled up, and Louis Armstrong on the stereo, and the dogs - just Millie and Buster and Chuck back then - barking in the kitchen away from the paint fumes.

And while he painted Will had thought to himself, I’m going to stay here for the rest of my life. I’m going to die alone in here, and the next guy will get it for a bargain price, and he’ll stand right here and knock this paint back off again.

He’s in Wolf Trap now. He’s waiting for the dogs to start barking again. He’s just painting a wall.

“Will,” Lecter says from somewhere close by.

Startling out of his reverie, Will steps back. Lecter stands beside him and together they look up at what WIll has done. GO BACK, it reads in thick, red letters a foot tall, NOT SAFE. Will’s hands are covered in thick, red blood. He stares down at the corpse before him, its innards strewn across the ground. Chunks of undigested human flesh are visible in the gore. An almost pristine human ear sits in the ruptured coil of intestine.

“Well done,” Lecter says.

“Thanks,” Will weakly replies, and doubles over, and vomits into the blood.

 

*

 

Will measures his time in candlelight. His thumb throbs and his headache fades. They reinforce their defences by day and he listens to the groans of the infected at night, with his his eyes shut tight. Abigail whispers words too soft for him to hear and out in the corridor a dark wolf prowls. 

He treads and retreads the floors of his little house at night. Counts every crack in the ceilings, every peeling flake of paint. Touches the spines of his books and the points of his fish hooks. He throws open the doors and lets the dogs run out across the grass - in high summer, in thick snow, in fall when every blade of grass is picked out delicately in frost. All these things that had once existed.

In the kitchen sink, he finds the ear. He pushes it back down his throat, and staggers backwards into his sweat-soaked bed and the fever dream; backwards into that blank, dark space between waking on the airplane and shaking in Abigail’s father’s cabin, dreaming that he grabbed her and thrust her up and back onto the points of the antlers. He had felt the weight of her body, and heard her gasp, and her hot blood had spilled out over his fingers. It had felt no less real than this current nightmare.

In the dark space, he finds the sensation of something pushing down his throat. Someone held him still. Someone whispered something softly in his ear, but he can’t remember what.

 

*

 

Someone is whispering something now. Will’s eyes snap open and he sits up straight. His heart is thumping. For a second, he can still feel the hand pressing down on his shoulder and the tube down his throat, and he flails blindly for the knife, coughing.

“Are you awake, Will?” Lecter calls.

His voice cuts cleanly through Will’s panic sharper than the blade of any knife. Will’s thoughts turn calm and cold and clear. 

“I am,” he says.

He can hear the groans of the dead outside, desolate and lonely; like the wind, they wail to be let inside. No creature, Will can’t help but think, wants to die alone. Keeping a tight grip on the knife, he stands and pulls the chair away from the door. 

Lecter presses a finger to his lips when Will steps out into the corridor. 

“Come with me,” he whispers.

He turns and walks back down the hallway. He has a hunting rifle slung over his shoulder and he doesn’t have a hair out of place. Will could hold him still. He could whisper something soft into his ear. He adjusts his grip on the handle of the knife and follows Lecter down.

Lecter leads them up the stairs to the top of the house, where the floorboards creak and the walls are bare plaster. In a cramped attic room that smells of mothballs and mildew, one single window remains unboarded. Will had almost forgotten the sight of moonlight. The sky is pitch black and there are more stars in that rectangle of glass than he has ever seen before. No more light pollution, he figures, and his eyes sting with tears.

Lecter slides the window open and beckons Will closer, with a finger to his lips again. Will comes in close enough to feel the wind on his face. The air smells of decay and brings with it the unending groaning of the dead. 

“They’re getting more active,” Will murmurs.

Lecter nods. “And growing in number, I fear.”

They glance at each other, then away again. Lecter lifts the rifle and takes sight through the scope. Will looks down at the blade of his knife, shining in the moonlight. He hears Lecter draw in a soft, satisfied breath and he looks up again. Pointing down into the street, Lecter passes Will the rifle and Will looks through the eyepiece into a world painted night vision green. It’s higher quality than any rifle scope he’s ever used before; it must have cost a couple thousand dollars. Only the best will do, in all of Lecter’s hobbies. No less than the art with which he displayed Cassie Boyle’s body. The art with which he presents his cooking. The satisfaction flaring like bright light in his eyes when Will took that first tender bite.

Will is distracted from his thoughts by the sight of a half dozen people jogging down from the end of the street, armed with guns and knives. A handful of the infected trail after them; they move slowly, but they don’t stop. There is only one way to make them stop.

“Our friend from the grocery store, I believe,” Lecter murmurs close to Will’s ear. “Back with reinforcements. I imagine she’s looking for revenge.”

“She thinks I’m a serial killer. Can you blame her?”

“I could end it now, from here, if you’d like.”

“No.”

“It would be quick. Virtually painless. The kindest death any of us could hope for now, in these dark times. Your writing on the wall probably led them straight to us.”

“I said no.”

Lecter sighs, as if Will is the one who had betrayed him. In the ensuing silence, Will watches the group of survivors hurry closer through the circle of green light. They have to pause every few feet to fight off one of the infected; the creatures stagger out of empty houses, reach through the broken windows of abandoned cars. The scent of too much fresh meat in one place overrides the instinct to solitude, Will remembers. A quick sweep up and down the road shows a dozen more gathering at either end of the street; the ones ahead draw ever closer every time the survivors pause to push back the ones behind. 

“They’re making too much noise.”

“Foolish,” Lecter murmurs. He inhales deeply. He holds the breath in his lungs for a second, savouring it like fine wine, and then exhales. He nods.

“More are coming,” he says.

Will can hear the groans. Where once there would have been planes and trains and cars, all the whispers and the yelps that make up the voice of a city in life, now there is only a single, deathless breath. It rises and falls like the waves of a great and terrible ocean. He can feel the cold water lapping at his feet.

“Turn back,” he whispers, watching the survivors fight off one and then another. “Give up, go home.”

Something moves in the bushes behind them as they fight: a head emerging, a hand reaching out. Will catches it in the crosshairs and shoots it in the head. Startled, the people in the street turn in the direction of the shot, their guns raised, and the beams of two flashlights pass back and forth across Will’s vision. For a second, it is dazzling. For a second, he doesn’t see another one of the infected drag itself through the gates and grab someone from behind. He shoots too late - its teeth already sinking into flesh, ripping out great chunks while the man screams. When the infected body falls, the man’s body falls with it.

Will shoots another and then another, while the group drag their fallen companion up onto his feet and towards an empty house. His blood is green on green, but Will can smell it. The horde of the infected can smell it too; they’re getting closer and closer, and more are coming.

“We - I have to do something.”

“What shall you do? Invite them inside? As you said, they believe you are dangerous. I imagine they would kill you-”

“I could explain-”

“And after they have killed you, they will be left with me.”

And then they start to scream. Desperate and frightened and rising like a tidal wave, caught only feet from the front door of the empty house. Will lowers the rifle from his eyes. In the darkness of the night, he can see only a shadow, engulfing. The distant beams of the flashlights waver and fall into that darkness without stars.

Lecter eases the rifle from Will’s loose grip.

“I fear they’re beyond our help,” he says.

Will’s fingers twitch. The survivors wail for help, and for God.

“It must be a terrible way to die,” Lecter says, watching through the scope. “To be eaten alive.”

“Make it stop,” Will whispers.

“Make what stop?”

“Nobody deserves to die like this.”

“And you have decided what they deserve?”

“Please.” The words catch in Will’s throat, but he pushes them out. He can barely hear himself over the screaming. “Hannibal, please.”

Lecter lifts his head away from the rifle scope at last, turning to look at him. His face is gentle in the moonlight. His voice is soft.

“No,” he says.

Will slumps back against the wall and Lecter shakes his head. He presses the rifle back into Will’s hands.

“I offered once, but you refused. Now you can choose to make it stop. You can do this for them.”

Will shudders, but he takes the rifle back and lifts it up with shaking hands. It takes a moment, in the frenzied mass of howling bodies, to spot the ones that are still alive. A few of the survivors are already dead. He waited too long. It must be a terrible way to die, to be torn apart by human hands and human teeth in a human face that doesn’t listen to your screams.

He fires three times.

He watches until he is certain, and then he turns away from the window and hands the rifle back. Lecter pats him on the shoulder, leaving his hand resting there while they stand in silence together and listen to the dead devouring the dead. Will stares down at his trembling fingers.

A human hand, a human face.

 

*

 

In the morning, in silence, they pick off the last few stragglers from the horde and pile the remains high - infected and survivors alike, all just bodies now. They set aside the better quality guns and knives and douse everything else in kerosene. Lecter strikes the match.

“You gave them the kinder death,” he says.

When Will doesn’t respond, he tosses the match onto the pile of bodies. The flames leap up instantaneously, bright and hot, and together they take a step back. Lecter is watching Will, the fire bright in his eyes.

Overhead, the sky is slate grey. The air is turning cold and the leaves are turning brown. Will doesn’t know what time it is, or what day it is, or what month it is. But he knows where they are and he knows who he is.

They stand and watch the flames consume everything,

“I want to go to Quantico,” Will says.


End file.
